Review
User Experience As Rhetoric If you’re reading this, I’ve deleted my dating apps. They were too damn depressing, and the more time I spent engaging with them, the more I came to believe that rather than being a machine for producing dates, dating apps are a machine for
Video Games
In a storm, find a shelter. Every year after every last year, we hear about more corporate buyouts, more layoffs, more studio closures. Everyone’s lost their job at least once, if they ever had one. Nobody’s going to GDC this year because it’s too scary to cross
Book Review
Touring the Mediterranean, Sexual-Style In 2024 I read Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey because I’d found it in a tiny free library. But really I read it because ads for the book had haunted me from tweenhood, twining alluringly through the pages of my mid-aughties Dragon
Book Review
Last week: the plot of A Mirror for Observers. This week: the point of A Mirror for Observers. Every week: some weird thing you've never heard of. Relevance? How do the musings of a 1950s-produced alien bear upon the world of 2026? AMfO has its highs and
Book Review
I Needed This Edgar Pangborn: you would think more people might remember him on account of having such a weird name, but he is a now-little-known mid-century science fiction author. To the degree that anyone knows him, he is known for the pastoral themes of his writing,
Book Review
Last week we pondered why I'd rate a book which took me an entire year to finish over a new awards-darling I finished easily in two weeks. As it turns out, sometimes what makes reading easy is when the content is simply not that deep despite the
Book Review
Reading A Drop of Corruption and Memory together Last year, during my ill-fated and soul-crushing encounter with the 2025 Hugo nominees, I accused Robert Jackson Bennett of writing a book redolent with fasco-libertarian dogwhistles: The Tainted Cup. Not an unentertaining book full of fasco-libertarian dogwhistles, so
Fantasy
The Other Guys Bioware no longer possesses a monopoly on CRPG romance. In recent years, many studios have left their mark upon the pantheon of video game beefcakes. Outside the Bioware frame, designers have found the opportunity to get a bit weirder with the beef, sprinkle a little variety onto
Fantasy
The Bioware Edition I am once again hitting the listicle well, and this time we clamber over an even lower bar. Have you ever wondered why the hot guys of video games, especially the ones that are narratively sexually available to the player, make so many straight male gamers piss
Book Review
Reviewing How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore It often seems most history books intended for the general audience are written with moms in mind, unless they’re about World War II or Abraham Lincoln. Nothing else could tempt a sixty-something dad out of his beer garage.
Book Review
A 1950s Collection Which Rips We’ll start with the cover: A beautiful blonde woman staring wistfully past a green scaly alien who has a big green conehead. Behind them looms a rocket ship and a purple glowing planetoid. I believe this image to be derived from one of the
Book Review
Post-America, Written Too Soon I accidentally read two books about the collapse or rising irrelevance of America while I was on vacation last month. This is why I can’t do leisure time: I box myself into the grindset by accident. The funnier coincidence about these two books is